Symphony.

bewildergeist: I respectfully disagree. If those of us who "know what we're doing" prefer Markdown (et al), shouldn't we educate our clients and teach them to have the same preference?

Not that I know what the best solution is, but the more I use Markdown, the less I like it. :(

IMO Markdown fails because it has contradictory goals. It wants to be markup that doesn't look like markup. But markup is supposed to be syntactically distinguishable from the content. Markdown encroaches on the territory of content, muddying the water and limiting the user's content options.

Markdown is intended to replace a subset of HTML formatting with the option of using HTML for anything beyond its limited goal of formatting plain text. But HTML and BBCode aren't really any harder to use or learn, so why not use 1 system instead of 2? Markdown syntax isn't intuitive for the most part, unlike HTML or BBCode, at least for English speakers.

Markdown doesn't even really do its own job of text formatting all that well. This forces the user to constantly switch back and forth between the editor and its rendered output to achieve the desired result. For example, if I wanted to publish a series of lists, it's very hard to do it correctly in a Markdown editor. Paragraphs get inserted into some list items and not others, lists get merged and converted into different kinds of lists behind the scenes, and differently from editor to editor. Very unintuitive, IMO. For the average user who hasn't learned HTML and who isn't looking at the source code to figure out what's going on, the formatting mysteries can be incredibly frustrating. But with HTML or BBCode, you know exactly what you are producing, and if you are going to have to learn a syntax anyway, learn something dependable and powerful.

eKoeS: While I share your point of view, I don't think it's always possible to educate clients in that way. In fact, it strictly depends on the client you are working with. Some of them just want to center a paragraph without caring about special syntaxes or workarounds.

I agree. Some clients must have it their way. In the end they don't pay you to make them unhappy.

Not only that, but I think there has to be a balance between the designer's dream of tyranny and the client's struggle for freedom. The citizens of your web kingdom need some basic structure, shelter from the chaos, but they also need to be able to make their own choices. Otherwise the masses revolt and beheadings abound.

But HTML and BBCode aren't really any harder to use or learn

I completely disagree on that.

And: For a web author (i.e. not you, probably) Markdown is the best way to achieve the famous 95 percent with ease while keeping the text readable. You say you miss the markup? My authors don't.

I was looking at the markItUp! editor at http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/ , and I noticed that it provides buttons for h4, h5, h6, and images while the symphony extension doesn't. Is that because these features were added after the initial Symphony port, or is there some other reason?